I have no idea how this works

[garote]

A co-worker showed me this a few minutes ago, and I am absolutely stunned.
Here is a piece of software that is so cutting-edge I have no clue how it works:

http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/page/default/template/pages/p/iphone.html

He pressed a button on his iPhone, held it up to my desktop speakers, and within ten seconds it had correctly identified the music playing out the speakers as track 7 from "Richie Hawtin's DE-9 Transitions" album.

So I switched it to "The Castle Hall" from Ayreon's "Into The Electric Castle", which starts out with nothing but 30 seconds of odd swooping noises. Once again, in less than ten seconds, it figured out exactly what track was playing, displayed album art, a track list, a link to the iTunes store, et cetera.

This is BLACK MAGIC.

Comments

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

It's a pattern recognition algorithm. Just because you don't understand how it works, doesn't make it magic. Try feeding it something that's not available through iTunes (Like The Braindead Monkeys). Or feed it more than one thing. Ooooo, or try *singing* to it.

[beatings.livejournal.com]

Feed it the sounds of your dishwasher, get Merzbow!

[graue.livejournal.com]

I've made too many field recordings of dishwashers to find this funny. I want to argue with your joke.

[stellar678.livejournal.com]

Check out Wikipedia for Acoustic Fingerprint. More impressively awesome than it is magic!

I know it's been available as a way-too-expensive service on AT&T/Cingular phones for quite awhile. You call a number for 30 seconds and get a text message a few minutes later...

[garote]

"It's a pattern recognition algorithm"?

HOW DOES IT WORK. DETAILS, PLEASE.

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

A former professor of mine might know. Here's an article from Wikipedia about him and his work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cope

The program he talked about in class would go through musical pieces and pull out "signatures" (similarities between the various pieces) and either verify that the pieces were made by the same person, or compose an entirely new piece in the same style. I'm guessing this software is similarly based. Are you impressed at the speed with which it makes the match or the fact that it knows some fairly obscure pieces of music?

[garote]

Both. :)

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

The identifying part seems pretty straight forward. All of the searches had results in iTunes, right? I would guess it's analyzing the waveforms of the input and looking for a match. As to the speed of the search... I was never good at searching algorithms. Maybe it breaks it down into a 20 questions-type search looking at different quantifiable variables and parring down the possible results.

These are just my uninformed inferences based on what little I know about searching and pattern-matching algorithms. 8)

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

Now I can finally figure out what they're playing in the f*!@#*$#*ing cafe!